Great question! This is exactly what I’m researching now, so please bear with me whilst I rant about Gregory of Tours and his friends.
I’ll approach this from two angles, firstly on exactly what early medieval historians were writing and what their goal was, if only to answer why these authors were so happy to provide space for saints and affairs of the church in their works. Then I’ll talk about to the ‘great men’ of the time, particularly who they were and how they were recorded. As you mentioned good old Gregory, I’ll start with him, since his work is literally foundational to understanding sixth-century Gaul and probably the second-best known historian of the early middle ages after Bede. Yet he did not intend to write a history as we would understand it. Since the publication of Walter Goffart’s The Narrators of Barbarian History (1988) we now have a very different understanding of the historian; far from a History of the Franks, Gregory’s Ten Books of Histories were instead meant to preach a particular moral vision to his audience, so we should see it as a literary composition, more akin to a sermon than a retelling of Frankish history.^1 Indeed, the bishop of Tours actively suppressed Frankish ethnic identity in his work and urged his audience towards a ‘kingdom of God’, an utopian state that looked very different from his world of warring kings and amoral bishops.^2
In this context, it is little wonder that holy men and women were given such prominence in Gregory’s imagination, for they were the ‘premier league’ Christians of his day and thus most worthy of admiration for their efforts in a world riven with sin. Gregory’s plentiful writings on the saints, who not only feature in his Histories, but were also (naturally) the focus of his considerable hagiographical corpus, form a telling picture of a man who surveyed the Christian world of his day and found it wanting, a view coherently expressed throughout his writings.^3 Hence his veneration of St Radegund, a woman who abandoned her secular life as a queen to instead enter a convent, who even became a new Helena for Gaul by obtaining a fragment of the True Cross from Constantinople. Tellingly, other women who wielded power but did not give it up when given the opportunity, such as Empress Sophia upon the accession of Emperor Tiberius II, or Fredegund, queen of Neustria, received a very negative press from Gregory.^4 Gregory was of course still a man living in a sinful world and had little choice but to be complimentary to Brunhild, the queen of Austrasia, whose court Gregory belonged to. Even so, Gregory found it difficult to come up with specific examples of Brunhild’s righteousness, which suggests to me that the historian was still critical of the Austrasian queen in his heart, but was constrained by political reasons.
St Nicetius of Trier is another figure who received much praise from Gregory and again we can see how the bishop of Trier fit well into the bishop of Tours’ plan. Like Gregory, Nicetius was a very, very grumpy bishop, to the extent of regularly accusing kings of being terrible sinners, on one occasion even sending a letter to Emperor Justinian, condemning him as the ‘son of the devil’ and the ‘enemy of justice’.^5 In this man Gregory had found a fearless champion of his ideals, hence Nicetius’ pole position in his Life of the Fathers, with only Gregory’s relative Nicetius of Lyons receiving more attention. The same was true for other early medieval authors, such as Bede, who gave particular prominence to St Cuthbert and Theodore of Tarsus, men who, in the Northumbrian historian’s opinion, had led the Anglo-Saxon church during its golden age, whereas by Bede’s time in the early eighth century, the church was very much a body in decline. This was probably not true in reality, but for Bede it was a deadly danger, since he saw in his own age impious monks and worldly bishops dominating the church, rather than the ascetic heroes of the previous, more heroic age. His focus on the ‘giants’ of the church was then a very deliberate one and a suitable strategy to achieve his aims, even if his heroes, whether Cuthbert, Theodore, or the ever-fractious Wilfrid of York, were all more political than how Bede portrayed them.^6
Nor was this trend unique to the early medieval west, as it was also one that found its expression across the world of late antiquity. In an excellent paper published recently, Douglas Whalin rightfully argues that Bede’s writings mirrored the genres and styles of Syriac authors at the same time; despite the so-called disintegration of the Mediterranean world, an interconnected community of faith meant that they still shared the same interests and wrote histories in similar ways.^7 The same was true in Greek, for despite the last ‘secular’ history of late antiquity, the work of Theophylact Simocatta (c.630), being the continuation of classicising histories of Procopius, Agathias, and Menander, it was a much more obviously Christian work. Even before him, whilst Procopius and his successors tried to maintain a sense of detachment towards ecclesiastical affairs, their world was a largely Christian one and religious elements can’t help but bleed into their histories.^8 Christian themes, of salvation, of sin, or more mundanely simply their conceptions of right behaviour, were simply a fact of life across early medieval and late antique historiography, so it is understandable that saints and miracles played such an important role in the sources of this period. I think we can go back even further and discuss Eusebius of Caesarea and other historians of his time, since Christian supermen were already gaining traction at that point; as historians of the sixth and seventh centuries were essentially following the models laid down in the past, it is again no surprise that they wrote the way they did.
Per Peter Brown’s suggestion so many years ago, holy men were both influential and authoritative, whether as social mediators or, sometimes, even because they genuinely had political power, such as the bishops in Merovingian Gaul.^9 When a contemporary author wrote about their age, they inevitably had to record the great men and women of their day. Bishops rebuked their secular rulers, clerics ran estates, and ascetics were widely admired. Miracles reinforced the new world order and the saints’ admirers naturally defended their heroes’ actions both before and after their deaths. More worldly accounts still existed and even religious works can be harnessed to serve secular purposes, such as Isidore of Seville’s project to transform the Visigoths into the new chosen people, as opposed to the sinful Romans, but politics could not be distinguished from ecclesiastical affairs throughout this period, so authors of the time could not either.^10 In this sense, early medieval authors were not different because they described the world differently, they were different from the historians of the past because instead their world had changed.
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